


Everybody's Looking For Something

by ceann_cinnidh



Series: I Travelled the World (And the Seven Seas) [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe-Zone, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Depressed Stiles, Grady Memorial Hospital, M/M, The Hilltop (Walking Dead)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 16:22:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11017083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceann_cinnidh/pseuds/ceann_cinnidh
Summary: Stiles Stilinski was not Stiles Stilinski anymore. He was but a lost fragment of a whole, wandering, looking for yet another missing piece in the end of the world.





	Everybody's Looking For Something

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in half an hour, so I'm really sorry for any spelling errors there may be or any blatantly obviously story line mistakes, but anyway
> 
> UPDATE: This story has been revised since I originally posted it, no changes in the plot or in any events but trust me - it's better now.

 

Stiles wanted to find Derek. Needed to find him. Nothing else really mattered anymore, not after he lost his friends, his pack, his-

His dad.

Their ghosts were clawing at his heels but Stiles refused to look over his shoulder and see what the world had done to them. He was running from them. Running to Derek.

Derek, Derek, Derek, a mantra in his head, the only thing that kept him from leaving this cruel spiteful world behind and joining his pack in the blissful arms of death. Derek.

The world was over and Stiles needed Derek like the dead needed flesh.

 

\---

 

Stiles tried to start out rationally - the last the pack had heard of Derek was before the outbreak; a broken medley over the phone of ‘sick… east… army’ before a calm automated voice announced the call had been disconnected due to crowded phone lines – so Stiles found himself pouring over a map of America trying to think like Derek.

They had no idea where Derek had disappeared to when he ran off which made Stiles’ job of finding him much harder. East. Could be East Berlin for all Stiles knew, but he had to have faith Derek was still in the country. New York? Maybe he wanted to retreat into the anonymity of the city, of Laura’s city, after all that he had suffered in Beacon Hills. Army. Maybe he was heading to one of the so-called army camps set up by their so-called government. They were all gone now, but Stiles couldn’t believe Derek was that naïve in the first place.

Sick.

It could always be, Derek was sick right in the beginning, and that his wolf was infected and Derek is now in fact dead like the rest and this was all a waste of time.

Stiles couldn’t let himself believe that, so when he found himself in the Beacon Hills Animal Clinic surrounded by nothing but the dead, he acted on instinct, and he went east. East where? He had no idea.

 

\---

 

The sun was hot, but Stiles was cold. The further he got from Beacon Hills, the greater the void in his chest became. Like he had dug his nails into a wound and each step he took pulled the flesh apart a little more. It was on days like this that Stiles found himself facing reality: he would never find Derek. Other days, he let himself believe that Derek was always just there, in the next town, in the next county, in the next state, if only he could get a little further east, east was where Derek was, east was where pack was.

He just had to keep on moving.

 

\---

 

Stiles had made it as far as Missouri before the Jeep kicked the can. He’d scavenged fuel from his desolate home town for three days and stacked it all in his trunk. When that was full, he put the canisters on his precious back seats and kept the window rolled down almost constantly fearing the smell alone would kill him. He’d have almost lost her if it weren’t for a scrap yard he’d ravaged in Utah. He’d gotten out one time to refill her gas tank when he was suddenly swarmed by walkers – he’d ran off and waited crouched by a ditch in the roadside for hours until they’d moved on just so he wouldn’t have to leave her.

He loved his Jeep.

A little pang in his chest told him he loved Derek more, so with a weary heart he hiked his bag further up his shoulders and let his boots take him where they may.

 

\---

 

He wasn’t even sure he’d made it out of Missouri before he was running for his life – thankfully prior to the end of the world, he was very good at this. Another herd – why were there so many these days? – had veered him off his track coming at him from the side. It was such a large herd he had no chance of running around them, and he didn’t trust he could hide from such a big group so all he could do was run away.

Familiar voices in his head screeched at him that this was not east, he was not going even remotely east, Derek was east, east east-

 

\---

 

He didn’t know where he was anymore.

He didn’t care.

 

\---

 

Georgia. That’s what the sign said. He didn’t even have the energy to scoff because this was as far east as he could get and Derek was not here. Derek was not anywhere. Derek was dead.

Sometimes, he wished he was a banshee like L- like _her_ , and then he could scream across the static in his mind and find a moment of clarity where everything made sense and he had all the answers.

 _She_ wasn’t here though, and neither was _he_. Nor were any of _them_ and he was alone, truly, utterly, and completely alone, so he might as well cease existence because hey – that was what _they_ did. Names were for the living, and he was not alive anymore. He simply was.

 

\---

 

He hated Georgia – specifically that stupid staircase ten blocks from here that he fell down. That stupid staircase that led him to be picked up by some stupid nutcases who still thought they were Atlanta PD who then took him to stupid Grady Memorial Hospital. Doctors, and police, and patients, oh my.

He could bust out of here any time he wanted, heck this break out would be a cake walk compared to Eichen, but what was the point? What was waiting for him out there? An even greater nothingness that awaited him in here, that’s what.

 

\---

 

Her name was Beth. She was new. Maybe she had people missing her, people coming to look for her. He pretended it gave him hope. It didn’t. It made him bitter thinking he was still stupid enough to even try and kid himself about such matters. The people residing in Grady didn’t have _people_ because if they did, they wouldn’t be here.

Noah introduced them. He liked Noah – Noah was alive. Noah stumbled over his words trying to explain that none of them actually knew his name so she could call him what she liked. Dawn called him Thomas which was better than his actual name (which, much like him, didn’t exist anymore). Gorman called him Freak or Mute depending on the day. Noah called him a new name every time they crossed paths and once or twice it brought an honest to god smile to his face. These smiles did not last for more than a few seconds.

He was paler now, thinner and shadowed. He felt like he did when the nogitsune was possessing him, but far emptier. He found himself missing the darkness, missing the companionship. All he was now was beige. Numb and beige and he’d take the black of the void over this nothingness any day.

He was always thinking of _them_ now, his pack, and maybe that was part of the problem. He couldn’t deny, it was a problem he liked; it meant he could mess around in the ice rink with _those three_ , and wrestle kanimas with _the other two_ , and hold up _that guy_ in a swimming pool for godless hours. Better than being held captive in a hospital to mop floors.

 

\---

 

 

Beth spoke to him today. She asked if he’d been here from the start. He shook his head. She smiled and told him about a farm and a prison and a family. He didn’t want to like her, but he did. She had a nice smile and a spark of something else in her eye.

 

\---

 

Oddities were his speciality, and Beth and Noah were creating their own oddity in this monotony of bed sheets and blue floors. He felt a feeling he hadn’t felt like feeling in a very long time – curiosity. He wanted to know what was happening, what they were doing, what they were _planning_. That wasn’t good. Feeling feelings like those meant he was a person and feeling the feelings a person felt was dangerous.

He wasn’t curious, not anymore.

 _He wasn’t_.

 

\---

 

 _That girl_ wanted to die again. Beth didn’t understand why Dawn wouldn’t just let her go. He felt bad for the girl. He felt bad for Beth too. He felt bad for the woman that was knocked over by their car, the one that Beth so obviously knew, he felt bad for Noah who might never run again, he felt bad for a lot of people. He couldn’t tell if he felt bad for himself too.

That’s the thing about being alone – you only have your thoughts. He thought too much these days.

 

\---

 

Something was happening. Not a ‘someone’s just collapsed’ something or a ‘clean-up on ward four’ something, but an honest to god _something_ something. The kind of something that played out to a symphony of gunshots and a tidal wave of running feet. The kind of something that got this heart pumping and his adrenaline thundering.

An age old instinct roared up within him – he pressed his way against the stream of bodies, towards the shots.

People. There were people, Noah was with them, and Beth – oh god Beth was dead.

 _Bang_.

Dawn was dead too. Not Dawn, _her, she,_ that _person_ who is now a body, who is now a _nothing_.

Beth was now a nothing too, but she couldn’t be, not Beth, Beth was a _something_ , she was a _someone_ , she was going to make it, she was _Beth_.

Noah, Noah was speaking to him but he couldn’t make it out over the rushing through his ears. He watched Noah’s lips repeat it, and once again before the words filtered through the shock: _come with us._

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to go out into the world where they were all dead and where he was dead and where people like Beth had to die too. What he wanted, was to go back to his bed in room 238 and close the blinds and miss dinner again.

Except he didn’t.

He went with them.

 

\---

 

Noah’s home was not a home anymore. That big guy? That guy was now just _that guy_. Dead.

 

\---

 

It was called Alexandria. Diana asked to interview him and Rick laughed, but she smiled a smile a cat would be proud of. She made him write instead of speak and his hand cramped, considering the last time he put pencil to paper was on his board in his room while his da- while _he_ made dinner. It was that tofu that he complained about for the sake of complaining even though they both knew he actually enjoyed it. Some beef sauce – he had known when to pick his battles – and a rice. And now he was crying thinking about _him_ (and his cooking that he so rarely took the time for after they lost _her_ ) sitting in the nicest living room he had seen since Lydia Martin’s lake house, the kind that dad always said his mum would have wanted and the kind that Lydia secretly found distasteful because she preferred the comfort and the homeliness of Scott and Mrs McCall’s living room because it felt like a real home and Stiles always agreed with her, even though Jackson always seemed at home enough in these extravagant environments, such a mirror opposite to how uncomfortable they made Isaac feel and so glaringly over the top and obnoxious compared to the warehouse chic that Derek frequented and oh god-

He missed his pack.

He _missed_ his _pack_.

 

\---

 

Apparently, it was called Hilltop. He rolled his eyes at the lack of creativity so deeply that it hurt. They paid a visit to Hilltop. And he was there, _him_ _that guy, he-_

Derek.

Stiles has never sobbed quite like it; he was not _he_ anymore he was Stiles and _he_ was Derek and they were _Derek and Stiles_ and they were so very alive and Stiles had so much to say.

 


End file.
